CIG-MAE: Cross-Modal Information-Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised WiFi Sensing

Abstract: Human Action Recognition using WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has emerged as an attractive alternative to vision-based methods due to its ubiquity, device-agnostic nature, and inherent privacy-preserving capabilities. However, the high cost of manual annotation and the limited scale of publicly available CSI datasets restrict the performance of supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising avenue, but existing contrastive paradigms rely on data augmentations that conflict with the physical semantics of radio signals and require large-batch training, making them poorly suited for CSI. To overcome these challenges, we introduce CIG-MAE -- a Cross-modal Information-Guided Masked Autoencoder -- that reconstructs both the amplitude and phase of CSI using a symmetric dual-stream architecture with a high masking ratio. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Information-Guided Masking strategy that dynamically allocates attention to time-frequency regions with high information density to improve learning efficiency, and incorporate a Barlow Twins regularizer to align cross-modal representations without negative samples. Experiments on three public datasets show that CIG-MAE consistently outperforms SOTA SSL methods and even surpasses a fully supervised baseline, demonstrating superior data efficiency, robustness, and representation generalization.